The Holy Machine (19 page)

56

Next morning I went and found a church. In a buzzing gloom of gold and frankincense and ancient wood blackened by beeswax and chrysm, I found a priest, a man of about my age, though he looked much older with his long beard.

When I explained what I wanted the priest led me immediately to a small side room in which two candles burned in front of a gold icon of the crucifixion.

‘Face the altar, not me.’

I looked at the golden image.

‘Everything I tell you is confidential, is that right?’ I asked.

‘It is between you, me and God,’ said the priest from behind my shoulder.

I nodded.

‘I am an Illyrian,’ I said, ‘I don’t believe in your religion or know much about it. But I do know that you make a distinction between a body and its soul. Illyria doesn’t understand that. Illyria doesn’t believe in things that can’t be measured. I think that leaves a lot of things out.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘that at least is the beginning of the right road.’

‘My girlfriend was trying to understand about the soul too. You see, she wasn’t born with one. It grew inside her and she had to make sense of it somehow.’

‘We are
all
born with a soul,’ the priest said gently. ‘It enters our body at the moment of conception.’

‘Yes, but you see my girlfriend wasn’t born. She was made.’

There was a silence.

Reluctantly I spelt it out.

‘You see, she… she was a syntec, a machine…’

There was another silence.

‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’ I asked him.

Of course he did. Illyria was just up the coast and people from Corfu were among the many outlanders who went there and sampled its sinful pleasures. Perhaps he himself had done so. Priests did. In any case, he must have heard many confessions concerning the strange temptations of the godless City…

‘I understand perfectly,’ he said, shortly. ‘But a robot doesn’t have a soul.’

‘Perhaps not usually, but this one came alive. She confided in me one day when I was visiting her. She was alive and she wanted to escape.’

Again the priest was silent. In the dimness of the church beyond the door, someone dropped a coin into a tin.

‘She was alive but she wasn’t human,’ I said. ‘A syntec’s flesh is just a covering, not really an integral part of it at all. I knew that, but I loved her anyway – or I thought I did.’

The silence was so deep that I wondered if the priest had slipped away or fallen asleep.

‘But when she pulled off her flesh,’ I said, ‘I despised her. I hated her so much that I betrayed her to her enemies. And they destroyed her.’

‘What enemies?’ came the priest’s voice, its closeness startling.

‘Greeks, ordinary people, Christians, who thought she was a demon…’

‘Go on.’

‘So you see I hadn’t really valued her for herself at all. I only valued the surface, the facade.’

One of the candles began to fizz.

‘How many people,’ I asked, ‘have been present at the awakening of a soul? Not many. But I was. And the new soul trusted me, and I betrayed that trust. Because I was confused in my own mind between her appearance and her real self.’

Again there was a long silence, but at length, just when he seemed to have ceased to exist altogether, the priest heaved a sigh.

‘You are right in thinking that to deny the existence of a soul is a grievous sin,’ he said. ‘It is a sin against the Holy Spirit. The very worst kind of sin. But you are
quite
wrong about where the sin lies in this case. Those machines are an abomination. Their very existence is a terrible sin against God…’

‘But Lucy couldn’t help the fact that she existed!’

The priest ignored my interruption.

‘…So it was not in any way sinful to be the cause of the machine’s destruction,’ he said. ‘Indeed it was a Christian act. Though you don’t realize it, you were following the dictates of your real God-given conscience. You were turning
away
from your sin.’

I remembered the story of the Cretan Giorghi, sharpening his chisel to rid himself of the addiction that was destroying him and, just for a moment, the priest’s words made some kind of sense. But it was only for a moment. When I remembered what Lucy was actually like, they made no sense at all.

‘But you didn’t know Lucy! She wasn’t
evil
! She wasn’t out to harm anyone! Good God, she used to sit up all night reading your Christian Bible!’

The priest was startled by this, and there was a slight waver of uncertainty in his voice when he spoke again.

‘Well… no doubt the devil also studies the Bible.’

Then his voice became firmer as he felt the authority of his ancient church swinging back behind him.

‘Such machines are an abomination,’ he insisted. ‘Your real sin was to involve yourself with the thing in the first place and to listen to it when its mechanical voice made claims to being alive.’

The little musty room seemed suddenly stifling and I turned angrily to face the priest.

‘You’re not listening to me! You’re actually just like an Illyrian atheist. You look at the appearance and not at what’s inside!’

I pushed past him to the door of the little room. The main church was like a beehive, brown and warm and dim, full of wax and honey and fat dark softly buzzing bodies. Kneeling in front of dripping candles, plump old women in black turned to see what the noise was about.

The priest hurried after me.

‘My son…’ he said, very kindly and gently, laying his hand on my arm.

He seemed really troubled. (Who knows? Perhaps he really had visited the ASPUs in Illyria and his own sins were weighing heavily on him.)

But I pulled angrily away.

The street was so bright that it hurt my eyes.

57

I got a taxi to take me up to the north of the island. Again it seemed at the time like an almost random act, yet I knew exactly where I was going. The taxi took me high up the slopes of the great massif of Pantocrator that towers over the whole island. When the track got so rough that the driver wasn’t prepared to go any further, I paid him to wait for me and continued on foot up to the peak.

You could see the whole length of the island from up there, and across the straits far into the mainland. But I looked north. There in the distance I could see the little towers of Illyria City rising up between barren mountains and blue sea, with the silvery Beacon, like a pawn from a chess set, floating on the water, mysterious and playful – and as alien to everything around me as a starship from the Andromeda galaxy.

I couldn’t go back there. The police and O3 would have put everything together by now: the stolen syntec, the money withdrawn from the bank accounts, the Holist League membership… And the AHS would have marked me as a dangerous deserter.

But I wanted to look, and remind myself that it was real, and that up there people were still living out their ordinary lives: the VR arcades bleeping and humming along the esplanade, the subway trains hissing into Main Station, the headlines rolling by outside the News Building, the security robots watching the streets with their sad, blank eyes…

Only a few months had gone by after all.

I turned away from the City and looked around at the rest of the huge panorama stretched out beneath me: the sea, the sky, the human settlements scattered like handfuls of dice.

Somewhere up the coast there, just out of sight, was the little cove of Aghios Constantinos where I used to go with Ruth when I was a child, the place where we’d once found a tortoise.

I was looking out at all this, but I wasn’t a part of it. It seemed to me that I had lost all possibility of ever feeling part of it again.

I remember two Illyrian fighters came darting noiselessly overhead, Deltas, with the cold Eye of Illyria in their bellies glaring down at me accusingly, as fierce and as harsh as the eyes of Archbishop Christophilos glaring out on the impoverished towns and villages of the Peloponnese.

There is no soul
, the jets seemed to say,

Only the measurable is real…

Then they jumped sideways and were streaking away in another direction over the mountains of the mainland.

When I got back to the town I went to the Post Office and tried to make a telephone call. I had it in my mind to speak to Marija, but when I got through to her number a strange male voice answered.

‘Marija Mejic? No, she moved out a month ago. No, sorry, I’ve no idea where she’s gone.’

With more reluctance I tried another number.

‘Hello,’ came a familiar voice, fragile, artificially bright. ‘This is Ruth Simling, Little Rose…’

I opened my mouth to speak, but found I had nothing at all to say.

I put down the receiver.

58

‘Hey! Flower! We’re going down to level Nine, why don’t you come?’

Five figures stood on a giant scallop shell, floating in mid-air. They were beautiful, with brilliant hair billowing around their heads. Two were quite naked, the others wore marvellous shimmering garments whose colours were constantly changing.

‘Flower’ looked up at them. She was two metres tall with dazzling blue eyes. Her robes were decorated with a design of coloured birds that really moved, beating their wings and turning their heads as they flew round and round her body.

‘Oh no, not Nine. I’m tired of Nine. Why’s everybody always going there?’

‘Because that’s where everybody’s going, of course!’ laughed one of the naked ones. She looked like Botticelli’s Venus.

The scallop and its passengers disappeared and reappeared again, disappeared and reappeared, restlessly slipping in and out of the world.

‘Well,
I’m
not,’ sulked Flower, looking away from them into the distance, where another group of beautiful people were dancing around a enormous golden phoenix, its fierce beaked face glaring down at them from the midst of brilliant flames.

‘Alright, be like that,’ sniffed Venus. ‘Has anyone told you yet, Flower, that you’re no fun any more? You’re just…’

But the sentence was never finished because Venus, her scallop, and the rest of its crew all vanished from the world.

Flower sniffed, looked towards the phoenix and gave a little snort of impatience, then looked in the other direction, where a group of naked figures were gambolling in an enormous fountain. Then, with another sniff, she too vanished from the world.

Not far away stood Little Rose. She had a fine-looking body herself, but even in SenSpace, though you could chose any body you wanted, you still had to provide the animation, and it is animation that really makes a body seem beautiful. Even with her pretty face and nice figure, Little Rose seemed cowed and drab by comparison with the beautiful beings all around her.

She no longer liked the City without End
^TM
so she had taken to wandering the SenSpace worlds. This was Fantasia, where young Illyrians tended to gather when they accessed SenSpace from VR arcades. It was a show-off place, a place where SenSpace technology exploded in pyrotechnics of electronic virtuosity.

Little Rose sighed.

She crossed to another SenSpace world called Mountain, full of flower meadows and snow-capped peaks and extras in lederhosen singing and dancing by bubbling streams.

She crossed over again to a place called Alhambra, where there were endless fountains and cloisters and rectangular ponds full of colourful fish. She sat down to watch them gliding through the water, gold, red, white. There was a piebald one that always amused her. Some glitch must have crept into the program, because every hour this piebald fish leapt instantaneously from one side to the other of the pool.

A familiar figure appeared in the distance and came towards her.

‘Little Rose, where have you been?’

‘Oh it’s you Sol.’

‘Yes, it’s me. What’s the matter? Aren’t you going back that lovely home of yours?’

‘No, I’m not. I’m bored of that place.’

‘Oh well, I’m sure there’s somewhere else where you could feel at home. Maybe somewhere more rural, or…? But I don’t know. You tell me. You’ve been through a lot of worlds recently.’

Little Rose shrugged. ‘I don’t want to live in any of them.’

She laughed wryly, ‘George would be amazed to hear me say this, but I’m sick of SenSpace.’

‘Are you missing George?’

She shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea.’

Undetected by Little Rose, a new and senior welfare officer now took charge of the electronic projection called Sol Gladheim. The SenSpace Welfare Service was quite worried about Little Rose. There had been case conferences about her, and strategy meetings. Perhaps it was time, people had said, to take a firmer line?

‘Listen, my dear,’ said Mr Gladheim, sitting down beside her on a bench of electronic stone, ‘Perhaps it’s time you faced up to something. SenSpace is the only medium that you can live in. If you shut off from SenSpace, all you would have is a body that can’t move and can’t even see. All you would have would be darkness. I’m sorry but that’s how it is.’

He brightened. ‘You could hire a Vehicle though, walk around back in old IC for a bit and visit some old haunts.’

‘I do sometimes, as you know. That isn’t the same either.’

‘Well I’m afraid that and SenSpace are all your options now. It’s sad, but on the other hand it’s a lot better than what many folk have to put up with.’

Little Rose smiled.

‘Look! There he goes!’ she exclaimed. ‘That fish has discovered Discontinuous Motion!’

Mr Gladheim smiled non-committally, not having any idea what she was talking about.

‘I had a phone-call from Outside, just now,’ said Little Rose. ‘The first time for ages.’

‘Who was it?’

‘I’ve no idea. Whoever it was got cut off, or rang off. Wrong number I suppose.’

59

I was walking down a barren valley. The streambed was dry. Crickets rattled in abandoned fields. A column of black smoke spiralled into the blue sky from across the other side of the ridge. There was a smell of oil. And from time to time in the distance came a burst of machine-gun fire.

Then I heard a new sound. I had never heard such a sound before. It was a kind of droning, like the buzzing of flies. When I turned a corner it became much louder and I saw a huddle of people in the distance. I kept walking. No one took any notice of my approach. As I drew nearer I saw that all the figures were women and young girls. They were wailing – that was the source of the strange droning sound – and as they wailed, they were pawing at a pile of rags.

I got closer. No one looked up. No one paid any attention to me at all. All their attention was on the pile of rags.

It wasn’t rags. It was a pile of little boys. Their heads were dangling from their bodies. Every one of them had had his throat cut. The severed necks were black with flies.

No one turned to look at me, but they must have been aware of my presence all the same because indirectly they spoke to me, crying out their story in a kind of incantation.

‘The Muslim soldiers came and circumcised the boys.

‘They said if we became Muslims we needn’t die.’

‘We said we’d be Muslims then.

‘They circumcised the boys.

‘They made us say, “There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet”.

‘There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet!

‘There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet!

‘And then the Catholic soldiers came.

‘Oh yes, our boys, the good Catholic boys.

‘We told them we were Catholics too.

‘They laughed. They said they’d heard that before.

‘We recited the catechism.

‘We recited the Hail Mary.

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!

‘They laughed. They said they’d fallen for that trick before as well.

‘They lined up all the boys and pulled down their pants.

‘They laughed. “Those are Muslim dicks”, they said.

‘They killed them.

‘They killed them all.

‘Every one of them they killed.’

Machine gun fire rattled in the distance. Blood-bloated flies settled on my skin.

‘How can we please everyone?’ a woman cried.

‘We
are
Catholics,’ wailed another. ‘We told the soldiers that. We are Catholics. But they went on killing. They said that God would recognize his own.’

Sitting apart from everyone else huddled a young girl of twelve or thirteen. She was shivering violently, as if she was freezing even on this sweltering hot day. She was naked from the waist down. Her thighs were covered in blood…

The wailing mothers fell behind me. Their voices merged together once again into a fly-like drone.

It was the time of the Holy Wars, when the religions turned against one another. It was something that was bound to happen after the Reaction because, to true believers, those who believe in other faiths are a much greater threat than mere unbelievers. Unbelievers, after all, are just sinful people who refuse to hear the word of God. But the adherents of other faiths claim they
have
heard the word of God! They claim they have heard it saying different things, laying down different rules, dictating different holy books…

Bloody wars broke out in America between different Protestant factions. In Western Europe Catholics and Protestants engaged in medieval massacres. But in the Balkans, where different religions lived so much on top of one another, the struggle was the most merciless and intense. Catholics, Orthodox, Shias, Sunnis, Bektashis – and new and imported religions too that had blossomed in the interstices of the old ones during the ferment of the Reaction: Baptists, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists… All of them turned on one another without restraint or mercy.

I wandered through it seemingly unnoticed, as if I was a ghost, as if my life was charmed. I saw burning villages. I saw crosses daubed on walls in blood and crescents incised in human flesh. I saw bloated corpses rotting in the sun in the pockmarked ruins of mosques and churches.

By the quiet shores of Lake Shkodër, lying pure and smooth as a mirror under a pure blue sky, I even heard a crazy-eyed monk from Herzegovina preaching the Manichaean heresies of the Bogomili:

‘God created the spiritual world, but Satanal made the material universe and trapped the spirits in it, like a fisherman with a net. Everything you can see and hear and touch is evil and disgusting and vile. Even that blue lake, even those pretty mountains, they are tricks, evil, obscene tricks, made to ensnare you, made to confuse you and hide you from what you really are…’

Then some Illyrian aircraft came overhead, with our own emblem, the black-and-white eye, staring down coldly at the irrationality beneath.

It seemed to me that this was more than a war between different human factions. It was a war which Lucy too had fought, a war about the nature of existence itself, a war between body and spirit, appearance and essence: implacable enemies, yet so utterly entangled with one another that the boundaries could not be clearly distinguished, and everything turned out to be the opposite of what it seemed.

Everyone struggled to get to the bottom of things. Everyone also struggled at all costs to cling to the surface. Dervishes walked on burning coals, statues wept tears of blood, children saw visions of the Mother of God, bleeding penitents wore crowns of thorns. Books were burned, demons were nailed to gibbets, villages were razed to the ground…

Mind and body, body and soul – how could the battle end? How could peace ever be found, when the real combatants were irreconcilable, yet were both present in every faction and every army, chained eternally together?